If you're a Time Warner Cable subscriber looking forward to catching Hugh Jackman and Lisa Kudrow on Late Show with David Letterman Friday, you might want to change your plans.
After another round of failed negotiations over fees related to retransmission consent—the permission that cable and satellite operators need to get from broadcasters to carry their programming—CBS has gone dark for Time Warner customers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. The kerfuffle also impacts CBS-owned Showtime, The Movie Channel (TMC), Flix, and Smithsonian Channel.
Over the course of the back-and-forth, Time Warner has said that CBS is demanding six times as much to carry CBS content to about 3.5 million of its 15 million customers (those in certain large metropolitan areas, it seems) calling the demands "outrageous" and "out of line and unfair" and more than others pay for the same programming. CBS said Time Warner has been engaging "in a public campaign of disinformation and voodoo mathematics (featuring wildly inflated percentages)" and accused Time Warner Cable of having a "short-sighted, anti-consumer strategy."
A chart on Time Warner's site details what some of its customers are now missing.
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